Chapter 49
Night Twenty
Sybil
Sybil met Caleb at a coffee shop near his office.
He was tanned from a winter vacation somewhere but still looked like he was fraying at every seam.
Sybil understood. Her roots were a cry for help at this point, her skin was splotchy like a patchwork quilt, her forehead lines had returned from her faded Botox with a roar not a whimper, so pronounced they seemed there only to mock her.
She wanted to get herself together, to check into a day spa and emerge a butterfly having shed its cocoon, not least because the only person she spent any significant time with was Zeke.
But a day devoted to her outward beauty felt fruitless, futile, not just because Zeke was growing increasingly insular with his laser focus on his training since they returned from Georgia, but because Sybil felt like a fraud worrying about her blonde highlights when Betty was out there, missing and in danger.
In Georgia, she’d held her breath when they checked into the hotel, hoping he’d propose they share a room.
But his assistant had called ahead: separate, of course.
She deflated at the reception desk, wondering how someone so intelligent—her—could be so dumb.
Also, he’d never once knocked on the guest bedroom door when she slept over, and it wasn’t like he didn’t have opportunities.
Why she had thought that a hotel overnight, while searching for answers about their missing friend, would be any different, she didn’t know.
Caleb looked distressed, staring at the photo on Julian’s phone of Betty at Grand Central.
Sybil wanted to show it to him in person, gauge his reaction, assess if there was some sort of outside chance that he was involved.
She’d asked Zeke to join her tonight, a second set of eyes, but his arm was aching, still hurting from getting banged up on the trip, and he was stewing on the couch in front of ESPN.
Training that day had evidently been shit.
As had training the day before. She overheard Timothy barking at him on speaker phone, Zeke replying in curt, monotone answers.
She left without asking twice.
“I definitely did not know that we—she—was being photographed,” Caleb said.
He was drinking coffee with two sugars because he had to return to the office even though it was eleven at night.
No wonder he and Betty had worked in whatever way they did.
Maybe aligned circadian rhythms should be more prioritized; maybe they were actually a sign of compatibility.
Someone who understands both the joy and isolation of the quietness of a pitch-black night might also understand your soul.
She and Mark were, of course, incompatible. She and Zeke, however…
She refocused. “But this is when you met?”
“Yes, for sure.” He pointed to a packet in his hand. “I’d gone to this conference for my boss that day.”
“But she didn’t seem spooked?”
Caleb managed a laugh. “I mean, Betty seemed spooked half the time, and I don’t think that had anything to do with much other than that was Betty.
” He chewed on his thumb cuticle. “I know she lied to me, about the Colorado thing. Probably some other stuff too. But if what you’re telling me is true, about what she left behind, maybe she had a good reason. ”
“I don’t mean to imply that she didn’t,” Sybil said.
“No, what I mean is, if she was being followed—or photographed—” He paused, and his face went pale. “Jesus, hearing it aloud is really weird, jarring. Like, if I’m freaked out by this, I understand why she covered her tracks.”
“And she never talked to you about her family?”
“You think someone in her family was doing this? Stalking her?” The color returned to his cheeks like a fire.
“I’m just trying to put the pieces together.”
The waitress arrived with her chamomile tea. Sybil still, all these months in, avoided caffeine, like that was going to be the key to curing her insomnia.
Caleb squeezed his eyes together, seemingly trying to remember.
“She said she wasn’t close with her parents, I remember that. And she told me about her sister. And…about her brother. The one who had also left.”
“Patience and Levi.” Sybil blew on her tea. She always made the mistake of drinking it too soon and just as often burned her tongue.
“Right, yeah, them.” Caleb lit up with recognition, so either he was the very best actor in the world or else he had nothing to do with the mess that Betty was in.
Sybil waited. This was a skill she had honed with Eloise and Charlie.
She always had a million questions but very rarely got the answers she wanted when she was forthright; more often, they wandered into her room at night to unspool their burdens, as if giving them space drew them closer to her.
Eloise had returned to college while she was in Georgia, and Sybil surprised herself that rather than lamenting that she was once again an empty nester, that this now meant she had more time to be selfish in her pursuit of finding Betty, in lingering at Zeke’s, when maybe she should have been home.
“Levi, I mean, he seemed like a real one,” Caleb said.
“Just wanted to burn down his childhood.” He cleared his throat.
“Sorry, bad use of that phrase. I just mean, Betty didn’t tell me about the, uh, cult stuff, but just said that he hated everything about how they grew up.
” He considered this. “Actually, maybe I should have realized that she didn’t have a perfectly normal childhood, now that I say this aloud.
Anyway, he had wanted to travel the world, I guess. ”
“Did she want to travel with him?” Sybil’s heart sparked. Maybe the answers were as simple as Zeke had proposed. Revisit the map of postcards, find the pattern, find Betty.
“I didn’t get that impression, to be honest,” he said.
“I know this sounds crazy given what you’ve told me—but I sort of think that Betty just wanted to be…
normal. Like, yeah, now that you’ve filled me in on everything, maybe she couldn’t be.
Like, at all. A crazy dad, a bunch of dead people at her church, but I still think that’s what she wanted. ”
Sybil’s eyes suddenly welled. Exactly, she wanted to say, because this was confirmation of all she had wanted for Betty too. She blinked quickly, and Caleb, now rewatching the commercial on her phone, didn’t seem to notice.
“And Patience?” Sybil asked, when he set the phone back on the table.
“Trickier,” Caleb replied. He pushed her phone back across the table.
“My parents knew enough not to fall into the real trap of their church, but there were times when they came close.” He leaned back in the booth, ran his hands through his hair, took his time.
“The only thing Betty ever really said about Patience was that she had thought they were best friends. You know, big-sister, little-sister dynamic.”
“I do.”
“Right, I got the impression that Patience looked out for her. I think she is six, seven years older? So she could sort of, you know, tell her what was coming down the pipeline.”
Sybil startled, that Patience must have been only twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old now. On her fifth child. At twenty-nine, Sybil’s twins were two, and she, despite being wholly consumed with how much she loved them, spent her days wishing she could unwind time to before she got pregnant.
“But Betty said that changed once she got married, once she was, er, baptized?”
“I guess, though she couldn’t have a formal role in the church because, I mean, if you’ve ever wanted to see the patriarchy at its finest, just join a doomsday cult where they are perfectly happy just riding this life to get to the next one.”
“So theoretically, her dad wouldn’t have minded…dying?”
Caleb laughed. “Oh no, I’m sure he would have. It’s hard to explain just how much bullshit is spouted from the heads. I think it’s more that they have no problem asking everyone else for sacrifice.”
“And Betty shared all of this with you? I guess I’m trying to figure out why she told you some real things and kept other things to herself.”
“No, not all of this. Some of this, I’m putting together right now, in real time.
But she did tell me that she lost a sister to the church.
I just didn’t realize…it was this sort of church, her dad’s church.
Like, she told me that once Patience was married, she sort of spied on her?
Betty told me about how she once checked out Are You There God?
It’s Me, Margaret. at the school library—”
“Oh no,” Sybil said. She reached for her tea, which was now a reasonable temperature.
“Oh yes. Patience had moved out of the house, so I don’t know, maybe Betty was thirteen, fourteen?
Levi was definitely still there because Betty told me that afterward he went to Patience and called her a ‘piece of shit for ratting out her own sister.’ It’s not much of a surprise that he didn’t last much longer at home. ”
“I think I’m rooting for Levi in this story.”
“Not all heroes wear capes,” Caleb concurred. He checked the time on his phone.
“I don’t mean to keep you,” Sybil said, even though she did.
“This is more important,” he replied, and Sybil knew, inherently, that he wanted only good things for Betty, that there wasn’t any chance he was part of the reason that she ran.
She wanted to extend her hand across the table and grasp his, thank him for caring about her when it seemed like too many had not.
“You don’t seem angry at her, about how she lied or maybe omitted the truth,” she said. “That’s very generous of you.”
“No, not really.” He shrugged. “Like I said, if you consider the stuff with Patience, and uh, yeah, her dad, it’s no wonder she doesn’t trust anyone, not completely. It actually makes perfect sense to me.”
“It’s nice that she shared as much as she did,” Sybil said.
What she really meant was that she was a little bruised that Betty never shared any of this with her.
But what would she have understood? None of it.
And here Sybil had spent her adult years thinking she was always the smartest in the room.
Maybe smart and knowing were two very different things.
“Well, think about that—her older sister, best friend. And once Patience got, I mean, I guess you could call it power…oh wait, Betty called it ‘corrupt influence,’ that’s how she phrased it, because I remember it still reminded me of something I would hear at my own church growing up.
But so once she got that, she became unrecognizable. ”
“I—” Sybil thought about how quickly Patience’s posture shifted when Matthew emerged from the house; how her crestfallen demeanor hardened into something steely, something cold.
“So yeah,” Caleb talked over her. “I don’t blame her for keeping her cards close to her vest. And I check my phone about a hundred times a day to see if she’s reached out.”
“She hasn’t, right?”
“No,” he said, and fidgeted with the cuff of his sleeve.
“And you would tell me?” Sybil set down her tea and stared at him.
“Ma’am, I know you might not believe me, but you sort of scare me. You and Zeke Rodriguez? I’m on that team.” He smiled, and she believed him.
“Okay,” she said. “And you’ll call me if you hear anything?”
“Absolutely.” He paused. “But also, I sort of hope that we don’t.”
“What?”
“If you think about what would have happened, how bad things would have been for her once she was eighteen, married, submissive, all that crazy shit…I mean, it makes you wonder how far someone would go to escape when their life is on the line. And if she’s still in the thick of it, I hope she keeps going until she’s ended it. ”